


Sleeping with Your Eyes Open

by zenonaa



Category: Dangan Ronpa
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-29
Updated: 2016-02-29
Packaged: 2018-05-24 00:16:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,528
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6134953
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/zenonaa/pseuds/zenonaa
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Togami falls sick so Fukawa has to look after him.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Sleeping with Your Eyes Open

The first person to notice that Byakuya has fallen sick might have been Touko, even before he becomes aware of it himself. It’s a bold claim and one that she would say snidely to others but not aloud near him. Deep down, though, she suspects that he must have realised. Not a lot gets past Byakuya. He must be aware of how he coughs more frequently and how these coughs have a rasping quality to them. Her darling perseveres despite his ailment, and when he spots her in the library and asks what she wants, he counters her concerns with ‘I’m coughing because it’s dusty in here and now because you’re here, it stinks too.’

On the second night since she first heard his coughing attack in the library, Touko follows him back from the aforementioned location to his room but halfway down the last corridor, he slumps against the wall.

“Byakuya-sama!” she cries out and she rushes over to him. Without thinking, she huddles up to his side so he can lean on her. He doesn’t try to push her away but he doesn’t try to push into her either. She wraps an arm around him and tilts him toward her. Her panicked breathing is louder than the flutter caged in her chest.

“I know what happened,” he says, slurring in a not very heir-like way at all.

Touko treads slowly as she leads him toward his room. Most of his weight presses against her small frame, but she manages to keep the both of them upright. His room lies a dozen or so paces away, not too far, but each step requires a good deal of effort because he can’t seem to move properly on his own. She has to drag him along.

“I know what happened,” he says again.

“What happened?” she asks.

“Someone poisoned the coffee beans,” he mumbles. “Or... the water supply...”

It’s ridiculous but she can believe it.

“Whoever did it will pay,” she promises fiercely. She arches her back and bends her legs more, teeth grit in determination, and she practically carries him for the last few lurches that close the gap between them and Byakuya’s door. Legs shaking, she slowly reaches for the door handle but then she remembers that she can’t open it without his key.

“Byakuya-sama, I need your key,” she says.

He glances up from the floor. “Where are you taking me?”

“To your room.”

That wakes him up from near unconsciousness. Byakuya jerks his body, almost enough that he breaks free from her hold, and raises his voice without losing its sluggish quality. “Did you think you could trick me?”

Touko twitches and says, “N-No, I would never do that to you!”

His head bows forward. He speaks through clenched teeth. “Obviously I’m going to your room.”

Inopportune it may be, a smile creeps onto Touko’s face.

“M-My room?” she says.

“Yes, so you won’t be able to kill me without everyone knowing where it happened and that you did it,” he explains.

The smile falls off her face much faster than it appeared.

“I would never hurt you!” she insists, but Byakuya speaks over the last part of her sentence.

“Lie me down on your bed,” he demands.

Touko lugs him to her door. Fishing out her key from her bra while burdened by his weight poses a challenge, but she succeeds and jams the key into its hole. She seizes the handle, shoves the door open and trudges over to her bed. Stacks of books barricade the longest sides of bed, leaving the foot of the bed the only clear entrance. Byakuya sits down with her guidance and reclines gradually. The back his head thumps onto the mattress, missing the pillow, but he wiggles up the bed until it’s underneath his head.

Her heart hammers in her chest as she stares down at him. He takes off his glasses and rolls his head to one side so she can’t see his face as clearly. She stands absolutely still in case it isn't Byakuya lying on her bed but a trick of the light that’ll vanish if she shifts her position too much.

Byakuya doesn’t fade away. Soon her eyelids grow heavy so she hoists her leg onto the bed.

The bed doesn’t sink that much under her weight but Byakuya discerns it, that or the faint creak which the bed whines out. He stiffens. “What are you doing?”

She cringes and explains, “It’s late...”

“You’re not sleeping with me,” he says, as if reading her mind. “You can sleep on the floor.”

“B-But...”

“I’m not changing my mind. Think. If you catch whatever I have, you will be utterly useless, and I’m not sharing a bed so Monobear can take a photograph of us for his next motive,” Byakuya snaps.

If his bout of sickness was caused by something he ate then Touko doubts that she can catch it from him, but she bites her tongue and drops her knees to the carpet, where she lowers herself onto her side and scrunches her body into a ball. It feels like the floor is pushing back against her but she resists its urging for her to rise and retire to somewhere softer, somewhere more appropropriate, and fades into sleep.

Though she never wished or hoped that Byakuya would fall prey to some disease, she would be lying if she claimed that she had never imagined the scenario. Just so she would be prepared if it actually happened, of course. In her mind, she wears a nurse outfit that clings to her body and wrinkles at her middle, and she slides spoonfuls of soup into Byakuya’s mouth as she rubs his crotch to prepare his injection.

Reality doesn’t live up to her fantasy, as she often finds.

“It’s carrot-ginger soup,” says Touko the next afternoon to Byakuya, who is propped up into a sitting position by two pillows and whose mouth is clamped shut. “T-The vitamins and nutrients in the carrots will help your immune system.”

He scowls, arms crossed over his chest, but reluctantly opens his mouth. Touko coos and slides the spoon in.

Later, he vomits it up along with anything and everything that he consumed recently. Not only soup but dry toast and crackers and even water. Hearing him heave wrenches at her heart but she stays strong for his sake, even though she never stayed strong for anyone else’s sake until him, and she wipes his mouth and replaces the cool hand towel draped over his forehead. In his first attempt to lie on his side, his glasses become lopsided, and though he can’t see himself, he from that point on refuses to wear them because he won’t let himself look undignified even to someone like her. She convinces herself to be touched at the gesture.

“You know what I think?” says Aoi in the kitchen on the third day of Byakuya’s illness.

Touko chops another disc of banana into existence.

“You should let him get better by himself, if he’s going to be so ungrateful to you,” says Aoi without being prompted.

“S-Shut up,” Touko replies, and her eyes flick up to glare directly at Aoi.

“Make him sleep on the floor,” demands Aoi and she waves her donut, having been told by Touko earlier that Byakuya was currently in her room occupying her bed so of course Touko wasn’t sleeping in a bed now. Touko makes a mental note not to tell anyone anything ever again.

“It wouldn’t surprise me if he made himself sick,” notes Celes, who after being served the wrong kind of tea by Hifumi for the third time, hovers over him as he makes a fourth attempt. “He’s such a sour person, it’s no wonder that he managed to unsettle his stomach. When it starts boiling, reduce the heat and let it simmer for a minute and forty-five seconds, Yamada-kun.”

“You shut up too!” goes Touko. She slashes another scar into the wooden chopping board.

Celes raises her eyebrows. “Calm down, dear. The wind will blow past you and your expression will stick.”

Touko tips the banana slices on the chopping board into the bowl of wheat cereal that she set onto the tray prior to preparing the banana. Her face burns as she stalks out of the kitchen and her face feels so hot that she can imagine smoking radiating from her body, which she would be glad to have happen because that would deter everyone from bothering her. She hasn’t cooled down by the time she returns to her room.

Byakuya doesn’t move upon hearing the door open and he says nothing either, not until she sits down. Then he stretches his neck out and asks her to read to him.

“R-Read?” she repeats.

He grunts.

She fits a fingernail between her lips and asks, “What should I read?”

He puts more effort into being intelligible and drawls, “Anything.”

Touko nods and sifts through the clutter on her desk for something that she thinks he would enjoy listening to. Most of her collection consists of books belonging to the romance genre, something that she knows he holds distaste for. Byakuya prefers detective novels, mysteries that he can pick apart, and though she doesn’t have a book specifically tailored to him, she does have a novel that she wrote last year which includes a theft that he could stew over. She slips through a crack between two towers of books close to her bed. Once she emerges on the other side, no books knocked over in the process, she sits by his head and opens the book to the first page.

Her lips part but rather than read aloud the first sentence, she just breathes. In her opinion, she doesn’t have much going for her. Over and over again, the world has instilled into her that she is ugly, and disgusting, and smelly and fat, but despite this, or maybe in a way because of this, she has a redeeming quality. The ability to write well. At first, writing was an escape from her life as those adjectives, but after being told that she had a gift, it developed into something more. People hung onto her every word, even those who claimed her to be worthless and only useful as a hat stand or a punching bag. With her own eyes, she saw how her readers were swept away by her prose, influenced to pursue fishermen or visit coffee shops or another item in the long list of trends that Touko set.

Not even she could deny that she had a talent, yet at that moment, she trembled at the thought of Byakuya tearing her craft to pieces.

No. He wouldn’t. Touko straightens her back.

“T-The last train left the station an hour ago, and the next wouldn’t pull up for another five hours,” she says, reading aloud.

Byakuya greets her with silence, so she assumes that he is willing to give more of the novel a chance.

“Above my head,” says Touko, “the bulb of a lone lamp glowed, the only thing in the vicinity to keep me company. I hugged myself tighter.”

Initially, Touko’s words shake like the girl on the platform in the story, who exhales a shield of condensation that hides her from imaginary adversaries. Such as eyes need to adapt to sudden submergence in light, details of the setting in the first scene creep into existence as the story progresses. The sheen on the speckled ground from earlier rainfall, the sting of cold on the girl’s ears, the strips of yellow paint that are the lips of the gaping hole where the train will be, they don’t suddenly appear, exactly, for it feels like they were always there.

On the second page, the girl decides to set off for home on foot and by that point, Byakuya has rolled over so he can watch Touko as she reads. She can’t know for sure that he is watching her because she only catches one glimpse of the blue in his eyes when she adjusts her position, but her skin tingles and that is enough evidence for her. This tingling sensation energises her and she strides through sentences instead of stumbling between words like before. Confidence rises in her chest and soon, she melds into the story, adding lilts and gruffness to certain characters’ dialogue, like the air-headed security guard and the shifty-eyed florist.

“‘A gloomy girl like you is no good for my flowers,’ Rei sneered,” says Touko with the same iciness as the florist. “‘They need sunlight, and you are anything but...’”

“Fukawa,” Byakuya pipes up and her name hangs in the air, like he means to say more, but he doesn’t.

It’s enough to pull Touko out of the story, back onto her bed, book in her hands. Touko jolts.

“Yes, Byakuya-sama?” she asks, peeking at him.

Byakuya has a hand resting on his pillow, close to his face. He curls his fingers into a loose fist that he fixes his half-opened eyes on.

“Why is it... that you’ve been the only person nursing me...?” he asks.

Touko tightens her grip on her book.

“I like taking care of you,” she says in a light tone.

As sick as Byakuya is, he’s still capable of shooting a glare at her even if he has conjured more intense ones in the past. “No one else has been nursing me. Just you. Why is that? Hasn’t anyone else offered to take over from you?”

“Well...” Touko pushes back her shoulders and straightens up. “I-It’s because...”

No one else offered. No one else wanted to.

“...  they can barely look after themselves,” she says. She makes it a point to sniff loudly, to show her scorn for their classmates. Their underlings. “Honestly, they’d make t-things worse... or take advantage of you...”

Byakuya’s eyes widen, just for a moment.

“That’s right. None of you are my friends, after all. You’re my opponents,” he says softly. “But you...”

Touko holds her breath, thinking he will make an exception for her.

“... Why are you here?” he asks. “What benefits do you reap?”

Her shoulders slump. She lets go of her book for a moment and looks away, fidgeting. “W-Well, what would we do without your guidance, Byakuya-sama? You have to get better.”

“Yes, that’s reasonable. You’re directionless, pathetic things without me, and would fail the next trial without me.” His fist opens up, like a water lily flowering, but his fingers stay crooked. “Continue... reading...”

She does. Around noon, he closes his eyes for longer than a blink and breathes evenly, so she tucks a bookmark into the book and fetches lunch. On her return, she resumes her seat by his head, tray on her lap. A yawn slips out of her and, to get more comfortable, she slithers down onto her back, until she is lying almost as flat as Byakuya. Another yawn scratches at her chest but she doesn’t let it out.

Touko’s eyes start to close but Byakuya doesn’t complain, so he must still be asleep, even if his eyes aren’t completely shut.


End file.
